Social welfare and Northern Ireland

Sir, – Niall Ginty (July 30th) is the latest of your regular correspondents to intrude upon the welfare debate in Northern Ireland, offering both diagnoses and solutions unencumbered by the weight of actual evidence. He makes the remarkable claim: "Failure to act with good authority will simply encourage a return to social unrest."

Is Mr Ginty seriously claiming that “Sinn Féin, and indeed the SDLP”, (plus, by extension, the trade unions and churches opposed to austerity) are encouraging street violence by not signing up to the neoliberal wish list that is the wholesale “rebalancing” of Northern Ireland’s economy? Is he asserting that riots will flare up if we do not eviscerate the welfare system, enforce the mass lay-off of 10 per cent of public servants and hand big businesses a huge cut in corporation tax?

My reading of “good authority” starts with speaking with good faith and using the best knowledge I can find.

The public sector in Northern Ireland is far from “bloated”, by UK standards. The private sector, on the other hand, is too small.

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It is amusing that those who assume to know what “the people” want, ignore them when they speak out. This is about a bigger fight than a dispute between Sinn Féin and the DUP leadership and the Tory Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Theresa Villiers. Millions of people across the UK are resolutely opposed to austerity and the Osborne agenda of a radical realignment of the state, one based on a “mandate” of 25 per cent of the UK electorate. I could add that of the 16 Conservative candidates who stood in Northern Ireland last May, all but one lost their deposits.

Good authority means exercising power in the interest of the least powerful as well as the wealthy and contented. Those of us still opposing welfare “reform” do so with better intentions and sounder arguments than the “beggar my neighbour” approach advocated by Mr Ginty and too many of the southern ill-informed commentariat. – Yours, etc,

PETER BUNTING,

Assistant General Secretary,

Irish Congress

of Trade Unions,

Carlin House, Belfast.